This article explores W. B. Yeats’s “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” as a space of irresolvable tension between the destitution of bodily life, imaged forth by the Soul, and the capacity of poetry to compensate for that destitution, which is projected by the Self. The analysis shows the poem to be a dense structure of mirror-like internal relations, primarily between the Self and Soul but also between the Self and the objects it chooses as opposition to the Soul’s vision. These lines of reflection, which carry the poem’s imaginative energy, will be investigated vis-à-vis Jacques Lacan’s theorisation of the ideas of the gaze and objet petit a.

The present article develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of the semiotics of the English of mixed-language texts as are found worldwide in various domains of public and private communication. The social meaning of such anglography, it will be argued, must be interpreted as a result of the bi-modality (verbal and visual) of its material realisation. Drawing on a range of relevant contexts (e.g. ‘linguistic landscapes’, print advertising, print journalism and social communication via the digital media), the article proposes an integrated framework of analysis, incorporating and expanding tenets of both Systemic Functional Grammar and Critical Discourse Analysis, which shows that the employment of ‘English as a visual language’ directly enhances the social semiotic impact of such texts by mediating between them as linguistic products and social events. Close empirical analysis of representative texts (public signage, print ads and private e-communication) illustrates the proposed theory at work.

The paper explores the use of vocatives in a corpus of 24 American and British films (the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue) by comparing film dialogue with spontaneous speech. A systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data is provided to assess how address forms used by English speakers in natural verbal exchanges are reproduced on screen, and to identify patterns of address that can be regarded as distinctive of film dialogue. The findings show a higher frequency of vocatives in film dialogue, which serve diegetic and extradiegetic functions. From a qualitative point of view, filmic speech effectively reproduces interpersonal functions and sociolinguistic variation associated with vocatives in spontaneous interactions; on the other hand, it is characterized by a sophisticated use of address strategies accounted for in terms of authorial expressivity.

Hotel websites have been researched from the perspective of vocabulary and discourse. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles and phrase frames in these text types. In this paper, I show by means of an empirical analysis that such word sequences characterise these sites as a highly specialised domain. With this aim in mind, I have analysed a corpus of British hotel websites containing 242,000 words from a database, currently being compiled by the research group COMETVAL. I show that bundles and frames follow very similar principles but differ in flexibility. Moreover, the existence of frames shows collaboration between the idiom and open-choice principle. In fact, most bundles in my corpus are instances of phrase frames.

The study of interactive features of language has been a very productive source of insights into written discourse in recent years, revealing the ways that writers engage with readers to successfully persuade them of a particular viewpoint in a range of different genres and contexts. While a variety of approaches have illuminated our understanding of these features, the concept of interactional metadiscourse has been particularly valuable in revealing how writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their understandings of their material and their audience. In this paper we draw on Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse to explore some of the ways that interaction contributes to the success of two journalistic genres: popular science and opinion articles. Examining 200 popular science and 200 opinion texts, we show that despite the broadly similar audience and sources of these genres, authors structure their interactions very differently, contributing to the rhetorical distinctiveness of these genres. The paper not only offers a detailed account of interactional metadiscourse in these genres, but illustrates how interpersonal connections are accomplished for particular persuasive purposes in everyday public texts.